Recently in MtPaint Category

The OMG!Ubuntu blog reports on the decision, however preliminary, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas to remove the GIMP image editor from the 10.04 Lucid LTS release of the wildly popular Linux distribution.

Read the well-wrought entry linked above for the drawn-out reasoning behind moving the "professional"-quality Photoshop killer GIMP from the Ubuntu base (it'll be available in the Ubuntu Software Center, or your other favorite package-management tool).

Those assembled seem to think that GIMP is not used enough and is not consumery enough. And that the F-Spot photo manager can do basic photo editing and is much better for the average user.

Oh, do I have bones — plural — to pick over this one. I still haven't made my decision on whether I'm for Mono (using the Microsoft-compatible open-source tools) apps or against them (and F-Spot, along with Tomboy notes and, if you've added it, the Banshee music player seem in my mind anyway to be the highest-profile Mono apps in the GNOME world).

All I can say is that with the geek-political climate these days, more Mono rather than the same or less will just give more users a reason to jump off of GNOME (and Ubuntu) in order to keep one's collective hands, if not clean, than at least Microsoft-free.

Again, I haven't made a personal decision about Mono as yet, but I'm far from happy with F-Spot.

And yes, I've been using it somewhat regularly. For my purposes, I'm not crazy about having to import images into F-Spot. digiKam can deal with images in any directory structure, and I'd like my photo-organizing program to do the same. I understand that F-Spot is more iPhoto-like in this aspect. I still don't like it. It's OK for my personal images, but I can't keep my businessy images separate. Everything's in one big pile in F-Spot, except when you dig into the actual directory structure the app creates. Yep, just like iPhoto.

In F-Spot I can add a caption in the "comments" area. Unfortunately that data does not come up in any other applications I use to edit or view photos. I can't edit the IPTC data that 100 percent of professional photojournalists use (and those are the guys whose images I handle day in and out).

F-Spot will sharpen and adjust the color of images. It will crop them. But it won't resize them. Huge, huge deal-breaker for my "professional" use of this application. (And why would I use something for my "home" images that won't do the job with my real work if I don't have to?)

Truth be told, I don't require all that Photoshop offers. On the PC I use IrfanView. And basically my "quest" for a Linux/Unix image viewing/editing program runs along the lines of "give me something that does what IrfanView can do."

Even the GIMP (and Krita, too, O fans of KDE) can't deal with the IPTC data in JPEG images, which I absolutely need.

The digiKam image manager in KDE, through the great Kipi Plugins, CAN deal with this data, and pretty well, too (although the limit on the length of the IPTC credit line is a bit grating and seemingly unnecessary).

So I've been using digiKam for the past few weeks somewhat regularly. (Truth be told, I tend to work in IrfanView on my Windows box at the office about 80 percent of the time when editing photos; it's the environment I know, and that does what I want it to do.)

digiKam is a bit unwieldly. Like many KDE apps, there are menus for days, along with choices to match. It resizes. Good. It sharpens (although the results aren't as good, seemingly, as in every other app that sharpens images; there are, again, lots of choices, and I barely understand — and can't get a great result — from them. digiKam can crop, but you can't enter the exact dimensions of your crop in pixels and then drag the box around to make the perfect crop like I do in IrfanView. Not a deal-breaker, but not good either.

And did I say digiKam is unwieldy. Why are there separate "edit" modes for the metadata and the image data?

I've had little ol' gThumb on this Ubuntu machine for awhile. And hearing that the UDS suggested and then rejected it as a "replacement" for either GIMP and/or F-Spot prompted me to try it out. Sure I had opened a few images, but I hadn't yet done any heavy lifting with gThumb.

It was time.

Gthumb, little ol' gThumb (that's what I'll call it for the purposes of this entry), does almost everything I need:

-- Deals with images in their current directory structure
-- Resizes images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Crops images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Can edit/add IPTC caption info (to the main caption area only) with the "comments" feature
-- Allows for easy save-as of images

The only thing gThumb doesn't seem to do (and I could be missing it, though I don't think I am) is sharpen images. I can live without that, especially if gThumb can create and won't destroy existing IPTC data in JPEGs.

(Note: Besides Krita and GIMP, my previous favorite light image editor for Linux, MtPaint, is also an IPTC-data-destroyer and therefore can't be used for my "real" work.)

So thanks UDS people, for mentioning gThumb. And if you're asking my advice, and I know for damn sure that you're not, keep the GIMP or don't. I'll install it anyway.

But look deep into your geeky, geeky hearts and find it within them to replace F-Spot with gThumb. Or at very least make gThumb part of the Ubuntu base, make it the default image-organizing app, and let the rest of the free, open-source software-using world discover this most worthy of applications that for the most part can free me from the purgatory of Windows-based photo editing applications for good.

(And while I'm on the well-trod soapbox, let me mention that I wrote this entire entry using the newish Webkit-based Epiphany Web browser, another lovely bit of GNOME that I liked in its Gecko days but like even more now.)

(And sorry [really] about all those parentheses, within which I'm thinking all too often these days.)

I didn't have high hopes for Wolvix on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt built in 1999 — since previous attempts to load the live CD resulted in an X configuration that needed a little work.

Since then, I've had quite a bit more experience working in the xorg.conf file, and I was able to get a halfway decent X configuration going so I could test Wolvix Cub (the smaller of the two Wolvix distributions, with fewer packages than the larger Wolvix Hunter).

As I've written on many occasions, I consider Wolvix to be one of the best Slackware-based distributions available. Both the graphical configuration utility and the very flexible installation utility — also an X application — add considerable functionality to a solid Slackware 11 base.

And with Wolvix (and the rest of the Slackware-derived distros such as Zenwalk and Vector), all of the helpful Slackware console utilities are still there. Xwmconfig, netconfig, mouseconfig, even pkgtool can be used in any of these Slackware-based systems. You might not need them as much as you would in a standard Slackware installation, but they do come in handy.

Wolvix also includes slapt-get and Gslapt, the Debian-apt-like utilities that changed the way I look at package management in Slackware.

Before Wolvix, when running Slackware I dutifally downloaded updates from the Slackware FTP site, then used updatepkg to install them. One by one. By one.

One time I figured that using pkgtool for updates would enable me to save time and avoid all that typing of long filenames, or the almost-as-long procedure of copy/pasting them in the file manager for each and every package than needed updating.

I ended up with "doubles" of every updated package, since pkgtool didn't know I was doing an update and just installed the new packages without removing the old ones. So when you're talking about doing updates of Slackware packages with Slack's default tools, it's updatepkg or nothing.

All it means is that slapt-get and Gslapt, which are included in Wolvix and easily added to Slackware itself, are essential for the person whose life doesn't revolve around using the updatepkg utility.

Just the fact that Wolvix — which can operate as a live CD with a Knoppix-like save file, or in "frugal" or traditional hard-drive installs, can be brought up to date in minutes with Gslapt in much the same way that apt and Synaptic work in Debian continues to be a revelation.

Put it this way: How many longtime Slackware users don't have and use slapt-get/Gslapt? I bet not many.

Once I had Wolvix Cub running as a live CD with X properly configured on the 144MB/233MHz Compaq Armada 7770dmt, I used xwmconfig at the console to switch between the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers.

Not surprisingly, both WMs ran quite well, even with only 144MB in the live CD environment.

What astounded me were the extremly quick application-load times. In previous tests of Wolvix, it was quick but not so quick as to beat Debian Etch or Slackware 12 under Xfce and Fluxbox.

In Wolvix Cub running on live CD on the Compaq, a number of text editors, the lightweight Abiword and not-so-light Firefox all loaded relatively quickly. I need to do more tests, but Firefox seemed as responsive or more so than the Mozilla-based Seamonkey browser is in the ultra-fast Puppy Linux.

I wouldn't want to run Wolvix, even the Cub edition, as a live CD in the same way as Puppy or Damn Small Linux — especially in only 144MB of RAM, but when it comes to a traditional install, Wolvix Cub or the more application-rich Hunter would seemingly make an excellent candidate to permanently run on the Compaq.

In contrast to Debian and Slackware, Wolvix installs with just about every application and utility I like, from Abiword to Bluefish, Dillo to MtPaint, and with extremely well-organized menus in both Xfce and Fluxbox. In fact, the Fluxbox menus even include little icons next to each category of applications, something I've never seen before.

I'm "sure" I could replicate all of this goodness in standard Slackware of Debian, but the former's KDE focus and the latter's devotion to GNOME mean that it would take quite a bit of work on my part to have as good an experience in Xfce and Fluxbox as I already enjoy in Wolvix by simply loading the live CD and doing an easy installation from what I consider to be among the best installers of any Linux distribution.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

The extremely lightweight Swiss GNU/Linux distribution Slitaz burst upon the scene in March of this year promising to be easy on system resources yet possessing enough power in the form of basic applications to actually get things done.

In my original non-review, I couldn't really get Slitaz running on any of three PCs, so I ended it this way:

Hopefully they'll get it right with SliTaz 1.1 (or 2.0), but for now, it's a distro with a lot of promise but not a whole lot of delivery -- at least for me.

But there was also this:

I'll try it in the $15 Laptop (based on a Pentium II MMX and with the Orinoco WaveLAN wireless card) ...

Coincidentally, I've been looking for new distros to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I decided to finally give Slitaz a spin in it.

It works.

And so far, it's quicker than anything I've tried on it before. The closest thing I can compare it to is Damn Small Linux.

As of DSL version 4.4, both have the "Bon Echo" version of Firefox, with Slitaz using a more-recent build of what basically is Firefox.

Having Firefox named Bon Echo presents one problem: It's harder to install Google Gears, which would enable Google Docs to function in offline mode. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but so far that's been the big stopper for me with DSL (and now Slitaz).

Another stopper: Slitaz seems to want the user to store data on a USB-connected drive. But this laptop, made somewhere around 1999, doesn't have USB. Hell, it doesn't have Ethernet. My connectivity comes via a Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card, and even if I did have a WiFi signal, which I don't, I'm not sure Slitaz 1.0 supports wireless connectivity. Otherwise, I'd be trying some packages from the Slitaz repository.

But in its "raw" configuration, Slitaz is a 25 MB ISO — smaller than Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, and with fewer apps as well.

The beauty of it is that Slitaz 1.0 is running entirely in RAM — and I've only got 144MB on this laptop.

Again: 144MB and running entirely in RAM. I don't think there's a system out there with X that'll do this without tapping into Linux swap (although Damn Small Linux might be coming close).

Like Puppy and DSL, Slitaz is based on the JWM window manager, which has plenty of features and lots of speed to go with it. Right-clicking gets you a small menu, but for the full menu, you need to left-click on the Slitaz spider icon at the top of the screen.

Slitaz is lean but does have enough apps to get by.

Besides Firefox/Bon Echo (version 2.0.0.12 on the live CD), there's:

• My favorite development editor Geany
• The mhWaveEdit audio editor (at least that's what I think it is)
• emelFM2 file manager
• Clex File manager
• mtPaint image editor (one of my favorites)
• Grab screenshot
• GPicView Image Viewer
• Gparted partition manager
• Htop processes viewer
• Lighttpd Web server
• gFTP client
• Grsync
• LostIRC
• Retawq Web browser
• Scpbox secure copy app
• Transmission Bittorrent app
• ePDFView PDF viewer
• Listpatron (I can't figure out what this does, but it appears to "make lists")
• OSMO personal organizer
• SQlite database
• Wikiss PHP Wiki
• Bc calculator
• Burn ISO
• ISO Master
• Leafpad editor
• Nano editor
• Xpad sticky note editor
• Xterm

I'm not sure yet how extensive the Web-server capabilities of Slitaz are as yet, but it does have the Lighttpd server, SQLite database, along with PHP, so you can seemingly roll out a dynamic Web page on the system as configured.

Once I get to a live Internet connection on the Compaq, I plan to check out the Slitaz repository, which has some applications that aren't on the live CD, including Abiword and the GIMP.

I'll have to deal with how to save my settings in Slitaz without USB, but in that quest, I found a great utility called Mountbox that enabled me to easily mount partitions from my hard drive and then look at them with emelFM2. Not that it's hard to mount partitions from live CDs, but this app is as good as the mount tools in Puppy or DSL, and I'm glad to have it.

However, upon mounting a hard-drive partition, I could see all the files there, but I was unable to write a new file to it. That's something I'll have to work on.

(Hint: When you boot Slitaz, the standard user is hacker, with no password. Root's password is root.)

After a read through the online documentation, I settled on the following boot codes for my laptop:

boot: slitaz vga=788 lang=en kmap=us home=hda3 sound=noconf

I was still asked by the system (in French, no less) what resolution to use for X. But the boot process was a bit quicker, since I wasn't asked this time to choose a language or keyboard, nor was I asked to configure sound, something that didn't work automatically (and never does for this laptop in Linux).

I created a file, saved it in the Slitaz filesystem and rebooted without the cheat codes. The file wasn't there. I tried again with the boot codes, and my file was there. The same thing worked for a Firefox bookmark. As long as I used the home=hda3 boot code (since hda3 was the hard drive partition I chose on which to put my Slitaz save file) when booting, everything works.

So it turns out you don't need a USB drive to save files in Slitaz.

There's a "Cooking" release of Slitaz that looks much changed from the 1.0 release, and I will try it soon and hope that perhaps some and hopefully many of my problems will be addressed. It uses Openbox instead of JWM, features desktop icons, uses HAL to automatically mount media and even has Firefox 3.

Another addition, among many, to the latest build of Slitaz is wireless support. Again, I'll have to burn a disc tonight and give it a try when I'm near a WiFi signal.

Thus far, Slitaz 1.0 is absolutely the fastest operating system I've ever used. While it's still fairly young, it boasts of a lot of functionality, and if it runs on your particular hardware, it's a live CD that's well worth having in your laptop bag.

I'd love to have another alternative to Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, both extremely lightweight — and extremely well-formed — distributions designed to be run as live CDs (but also capable of being installed to the hard drive). And again, running entirely in RAM with only 144MB is as lightweight as they come.

Right now, I can't use Slitaz with the same "expertise" with which I can use Puppy or DSL. But for a quick-booting, quick-working live CD, Slitaz does exceedingly well for such an early stage in its life.

I'll be watching Slitaz very closely, and I expect big things for it in the future, should development continue — and I really do hope it does.

Point of order: According to the boot screen, Slitaz stands for "Simple, Light, Incredible, Temporary Autonomous Zone."

So far, Slitaz lives up to that name.

More on Slitaz:
Slitaz on Distrowatch
Distrowatch review of Slitaz
My first Slitaz post from April 2008
K.Mandla's review of Slitaz
TechieMoe review of Slitaz
TechSource review of Slitaz

I knew that Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 had Gslapt -- the graphical front end to the get-slapt package manager for Slackware -- but for some reason I had no idea that it would be useful for updates.

But commenter Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér gently told me that Wolvix's get-slapt/Gslapt indeed points to a Slackware 11 mirror, as well as Wolvix's own repository.

So I opened up Gslapt, updated and upgraded. I didn't add anything, so I can't vouch for get-slapt/Gslapt's ability to satisfy dependencies, but the upgrade went perfectly, and now I've got a fully up-to-date Wolvix distribution.

Already I've said that Wolvix (and perhaps by extension Slackware 11 -- not 12) is the best-performing Slackware-derived distribution I've tried. I've had no configuration problems whatsoever. And a look in Gslapt shows me that there's a huge number of Slackware packages that I could potentially install.

But one of the great things about Wolvix Hunter is that it pretty much has everything I want. It looks great, now has the latest Firefox browser, OpenOffice, MtPaint, the GIMP, AbiWord, a ton of multimedia apps, just as many networking apps, even a bunch of text editors (I'm currently exploring what Bluefish has to offer, but there's also Mousepad, KompoZer, SciTE, medit, vi, GNU nano and JOE). Mail clients? Hunter has Claws Mail and Thunderbird in the GUI, plus mutt at the console.

And the Wolvix Control Panel is one of the best configuration GUIs I've seen.

Never mind that the current versions of Zenwalk and Vector won't run (they'll install, but they won't even give me a shell login; it's probably something having to do with a hardware hangup).

The more I use it, the more I like Wolvix.

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 image from Wolvix.org.

After dual-booting Ubuntu (at times 7.04 and 7.10) and Debian (first Etch, then Lenny, then a couple of Lennies for a couple of days) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I've said goodbye to Ubuntu for the time being and decided to install the dependable Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (the bigger of the two Wolvix distros) and keep Debian (still Lenny). After "losing" two Ubuntu 7.10 installs to unknown causes -- both times processes began slowing to a crawl -- I thought rolling back to Ubuntu 7.04 would give me something stable.

But the boot process for 7.04 began stalling at something having to do with the CD drive (I turned off "quiet spash" in GRUB so I could see where it was dying). I'm thinking that either my laptop or Ubuntu itself must be somehow cursed. One of the reasons I had Ubuntu installed, besides the fact that it works pretty well (when it does work) with this laptop, is that I can easily get Internet Explorer (via IEs4Linux) on the box. There's one Web site I work on that absolutely requires IE, and my need for such access could grow from minimal to critical at just about any time. That hasn't happened yet. What I'd like to see is updated instructions at IEs4Linux to get it set up on Debian. (As far as Debian goes, IEs4Linux remains stuck in the Sarge era).

But suffering through three dead Ubuntu installs in a row has made me weary. For one thing, I'm going back to separate partitions for /home. That's how I have Wolvix set up. Wolvix can be run as a live CD, a frugal install or a full install. I believe the frugal install saves files in the same way as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux, and I want to be able to access the partition when booting Debian, so I opted for the full install. I don't think Wolvix provides updates in the way Debian, Ubuntu and other "established" distros do. No matter. It runs even better on this laptop than it did on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (where Wolvix was tested along with another crop of distros in my gOS comparison).

And Wolvix has another thing going for it: It's a Slackware-based distro that actually installs and runs with no trouble. Slackware 12 runs ... but I just can't get the X configuration right (and just about any other Slack-based distro offers a better Xfce experience in terms of applications and tools than Slackware itself, which remains a KDE-focused distro, albeit a faster KDE distro than any other). Both Zenwalk and Vector have been problematic; I can install, but something funky happens during booting and I can't even get to a console. I suppose I could turn off ACPI, AGP, IRQs and the like ... but if Wolvix can just run, why not the others? I probably will try to put Slackware 11 on the box at some point just to see if it's Slackware 12 that's screwing me over (Wolvix is based on Slack 11).

Anyhow, besides the fact that it runs and installs seamlessly, I really like the look of Wolvix, as well as the software mix in Wolvix Hunter (which features heavier apps like Open Office and the GIMP, along with lighter ones such as MtPaint, AbiWord and Dillo). Wolvix ships with Xfce and Fluxbox as window managers. In my recent tests, I've determined that Fluxbox doesn't provide much of a speed advantage over Xfce, and since Xfce has many more features, I'm pretty much running it exclusively, even on the aged $15 Laptop (a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM). And while the spread between Xfce and Fluxbox isn't as wide as one would think, Xfce does provide significant speed advantages over GNOME and KDE

The Wolvix Control Panel app is excellent. For everything from configuration to installation, Wolvix is way ahead of most of the distributions I've used. While the network-configuration portion of the control panel can be somewhat confusing (it reminds me of Zenwalk), it does work. Before I figured it out, I tried using Slackware's netconfig utility in Wolvix. It doesn't seem to work, though you can go through the paces. At least Wolvix offers a utility that does work. With a distro like the highly touted gOS offering NO network configuration utility (they think everybody has DHCP), I'm thankful for any kind of help. Yes, I can hack the text files that hold Linux's network configuration, but I'd prefer not to. It's just the way I am.

Since I'm constantly switching between a static IP at the office and dynamic IP at home, it's taking me a few extra steps (I love being able to easily switch between network settings in Debian and Ubuntu), but the trade-off is worth if since Wolvix otherwise performs so well.

And the Debian Lenny honeymoon is way, way over for me. I've considered rolling it back to Etch. My Alps touchpad issues are coming back (it's not as perfect as it is in Wolvix, Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10), and the fact that the new Lenny kernel seemed able to manage the noisy Gateway CPU fan for a day but not thereafter is very troubling. I can continue to use the Etch kernel with Lenny, and I just might do that, but I'm left wondering what's going on and whether or not there's an easier fix.

What I did do, for both Wolvix AND Debian Lenny, was put my fan-managing cron job to work. It basically checks CPU temp every five minutes and, if it goes above 60C, turns the fan on, then turns it off when it goes below 50C. Rather than a shell script and a cron job, I'd just like a single line of code that I could stick in some config file to make this work. I've seen things similar to what I need, but I haven't yet nailed it down for the Gateway Solo 1450.

I did, however, get the fan to stop in Debian from boot (using @reboot as the time element for the entry in crontab for the first instance of the cron job, then following with */5 * * * * to run it every five minutes thereafter. Again, I will detail the Gateway Solo 1450 fan-control solution, step by step, in a future entry.

And while I think a cron job is a sloppy, hackish way to deal with a CPU fan, I've done it now in Puppy, Wolvix and Debian, so I'm pretty much getting used to it. It's notable that in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I couldn't get the system to allow me to turn the CPU fan on and off, even when sudoing the command. I guess I needed to write to root's crontab, and sudoing can't quite qet you there. At least that's my six-second analysis of the situation. I would've loved to put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the laptop -- perhaps it could stick around without self-destructing like 7.10 and 7.04. I seem to remember Ubuntu, at least in the alternate install, offering to create a root account. Maybe if I install with the alternate CD, I can get control of the fan. But do I really want to run Ubuntu 6.06 LTS?

Briefly, here is where Ubuntu is falling down:

$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

yields the following:

bash: /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state: Permission denied

In every other distro on which I've used this line in my cron job, I need to su to root to run it (Puppy logs you on as root, so it's no problem there). But I can't seem to get it to work in Ubuntu. As it is, 6.06 LTS only has five months of support remaining still has a year and five months of support remaining (I'm no math whiz). Might as well wait until 8.04 comes out as the next LTS (or just stick with CentOS 5). ... Then again, Ubuntu 6.06 is from the Debian Sarge era. I smell another install of MepisLite 3.3 .. or maybe the recently updated -- even though I thought it was dead -- Sarge itself. I could always try to solve my Alps touchpad problems and stop my whining (if only ...).

UPDATE: I figured out how to shut the fan on and off in Ubuntu. Details tomorrow morning.

I did keep Debian Lenny (upgraded from Etch). And I know this is the testing distribution and not stable, but I was alarmed by a bug I discovered in the Nautilus file manager. When in a Nautilus window, if you right-click on a file and try to get its properties, Nautilus crashes, a bug report screen comes up, and then Nautilus relaunches. I filled out the bug report and went to the Web page for the bug. While there are about 500 reports of the same bug, it looks like the bug itself has been "closed." Well, it's not fixed, but the report is closed. It says that the bug goes away in Gnome 2.20.1. I have 2.20.2, and it hasn't gone away. I'm hoping that it will, but if the problem with the Ted word processor being catastrophically broken in both Etch and Lenny is any indication, I won't hold my breath. I guess I don't quite understand how bugs are dealt with.

As I said, I'm considering rolling it back to Etch. I'm also considering an installation of CentOS 5.0, which manages the CPU fan fine. Pros: CentOS, a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will be supporting this distro for YEARS; if it works now, it'll get security patches for a long, long time. Cons: it's harder -- at least for me -- to find as much variety in software as there is for Debian, Ubuntu, even Slackware. I'm sure there's plenty of software out there -- and there's nothing stopping me from compiling my own -- but I just couldn't get the hang of adding repositories and GPG keys. Just finding and installing AbiWord was beyond my capabilities. Perhaps a RHEL 5 book would help me; they've got to be out there. Another con: RHEL -- and, by extension , CentOS -- doesn't play MP3s or even Ogg audio files. I'm sure the codecs are out there, but I like the fact that most Linux distros -- whatever philosophy of freedom they espouse -- at least play an MP3. Hell -- I even can play Oggs in Windows Media Player on my XP box.

But what I did do with Lenny today was pack a bunch of software onto it. I threw all the kids' educational stuff I could find, the GIMP (I can't believe Debian doesn't ship with the GIMP), plus digiKam, which the esteemed Carla Schroder recommended to me as the best Linux image editor -- one that also deals with the IPTC caption info that I need to both preserve and edit. (Both the GIMP, as well as Krita and MtPaint not only won't edit the IPTC text embedded in a JPEG by Photoshop, they completely erase the info; NOT NICE.)

By the way, I thought about doing a frugal install of Puppy Linux, but what I did was preserve my pup_save on the Debian partition so I can continue running Puppy from CD (I'm still on 3.00; I've had no problems, so I haven't tried the 3.01 CD yet, although I do have it).

I wish Damn Small Linux would run better on the Gateway, but I'm still running DSL 4.0 on the older $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). There are new releases of DSL in the 4 series and also in the 3 series. I have to say that I like both of them. I did a lot of work with DSL 3.2 and 3.3, and I'm glad the developers are keeping both going. I am disappointed, however, that the version of Firefox (it's 1.0.something) in DSL does not work with Google Docs. I was hoping to run DSL instead of Debian Etch (the main distro on the Compaq's puny 3 GB hard drive) and gain some speed in Google Docs, but it is not to be. For better or worse, it's another point in Puppy's favor -- Puppy's Seamonkey browser/e-mail/HTML-generator app can handle Google Docs. But now that both Puppy and DSL feature MtPaint, at least they're equal in terms of image editing; for me, MtPaint is the best lightweight image editor for Linux. If it edited the IPTC info, I'd be in geek heaven. Since it doesn't, I remain on geek terra firma.

And I continue to prefer Geany as a text editor over DSL's Beaver (and over Xfce's Mousepad, GNOME's Gedit, anything that comes with KDE ... should I go on?).

I'm having one problem with Puppy: One of the Web sites I work on -- LA.com -- has an obscene amount of Flash animation, and it crashes Seamonkey every time I try to access it. I thought that Firefox might make a difference, so I installed the PET package. But the site crashes Firefox, too. I don't have this problem in any other Linux distro or in Windows or Mac, so something fishy is going on. Yeah, the amount of Flash is obnoxious, but it's not my call.

This entry is way too long, and I didn't even mention my re-flirtation with PC-BSD. After I deleted Ubuntu and before I put Wolvix on the laptop, I decided to do another PC-BSD install. The install itself went fine. I still had that weird graphic blob below the cursor. And I downloaded three PBI files to update my 1.4 release (I didn't feel like burning a new CD, since's I've only got two left in my formerly 100-CD stack). One PBI took it from 1.4 to 1.4.1, the next to 1.4.1.1, and the last to 1.4.1.2. They couldn't do this in a regular software update? Anyway, I couldn't go from 1.4.1.1 to 1.4.1.2 -- it said something about only updating from 1.4.1. And BSD is different enough from Linux that the prospect of adapting my fan-quieting cron job to BSD is and will remain way beyond my capabilities.

So PC-BSD met the same fate as it did the last few times I installed it; it came down quickly. I'm enjoying Wolvix Hunter right now.

So here's where I stand this week with the $0 Laptop: Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the hard drive (Wolvix with its own /home, so I can roll a new distro over it without killing out my files) and Puppy 3.00 as a live CD. But I'm thisclose to slapping Ubuntu 6.06 LTS or CentOS 5.0 in there.

Like many of you, I'm stuck between changing Linux and BSD distributions like underwear and finding something that can serve me for years without it either falling apart or me yearning for something better.

I've had Debian Etch with the Xfce desktop on the $15 Laptop for a couple of weeks. It took up a lot less space than Slackware 12 with Xfce (and NOT KDE), so I left Debian on the computer, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 64 MB of RAM.

I had a trick to get the ALSA sound working in Damn Small Linux, but it wouldn't work in Debian. I don't have the soundcore module installed, and that's the next step in getting the sound working.

I also found out that doing a Google Docs session in Debian on this box is ... frustrating. The screen moves way too slow.

So I went in a different direction. I popped in the Damn Small Linux 4.0 CD (I know they're up to 4.2, but I haven't downloaded and burned the new ISO yet ... I plan to soon).

Already the box seems much snappier. I'm using the toram boot code, which means the whole OS pretty much loads into RAM, but DSL does use the Linux swap partition on the hard drive. I find this to be a good compromise because I'm not committing to even a "frugal" install on the hard drive, and whenever I want to upgrade, I can just burn a new CD and use it -- I'll be using the same swap space when needed, but I won't have to upgrade any files on the hard-drive install because I'm not doing one.

As I've said before, for Linux distributions designed to be used as live CDs -- like Puppy, DSL and Knoppix -- I find that it's best to use them as they were intended and not to do full installs, or even frugal installs (although I've violated my own "rule" many times).

I'm going to run DSL 4.0 for awhile on the Compaq. I might switch it out for DSL 4.2 sooner rather than later because I use MtPaint -- a new app in DSL 4.2 but a longtime Puppy Linux image editor. Once I get a chance to run a Google Docs session in Firefox on DSL, I'll be able to see if it goes better than with Debian ... and how much better. I'll do the same with Puppy Linux before committing to anything, but if I'm using live CDs, there's no reason why Puppy and DSL can't coexist very well on this box.

I still need to do the actual tests, but I get the feeling that I'll be wiping Debian Etch off of the hard drive and leaving just a Linux swap partition and empty ext3 partitions for Puppy and DSL. We'll see.

I haven't updated much in the past few days because I haven't used the Puppy box much in that time. I finished up my long gOS review -- and come to think of it, Puppy would be perfect for the Everex Linux PC. You could keep gOS on there but boot Puppy from the CD/DVD drive and have a super-fast system that blows the standard gOS install out of the proverbial water.

But back to the second Thin Puppy Torture Test. The box has been chugging along, no problem.

Today I had somebody ask me to grab a bunch of photos off of two SD Flash memory cards. I plugged my card reader into the remaining USB port, used the Puppy Drive Mounter to mount and open it, and then I dragged a bunch of images to the My-Documents folder, which if you've used Puppy before, is owned by root.

And in Puppy, you run as root, not in a normal user account. There have been all kinds of arguments about the wisdom of running as root -- and it's many people's main complaint about Puppy, that running as root is not safe. Damn Small Linux creates a user account when you boot the live CD, and you can go multiuser and create named accounts if you want. I believe the GrafPup spin of Puppy also allows the use of user accounts. ... And Puppy allows you to create any number of pup_save files, booting into whichever one you wish (and also encrypting and password-protecting them if you want), allowing for multiple users on the same computer (but still running as root).

I'm not really qualified to comment on the root vs. user debate, but I've never had any problems, and I understand that especially in the live CD environment, it doesn't matter as much. Again, I leave it to the experts.

But back to the photos. There were quite a few of them, and I only have a 256 MB Flash drive connected to the Thin Puppy box, so I didn't/couldn't transfer them all to Puppy's filesystem.

Still, after I transferred some and then later deleted them, my Puppy "free RAM" indicator dropped from 111 MB to 89.9 MB and stayed there. I've been told that this indicator is not a true picture of free RAM on the system, but it's curious that it drops and, at this point at least, doesn't rebound after files are deleted.

I pulled the card reader before unmounting the Flash card, and I got a warning message from Puppy. Remember to unmount your media!! The message suggested that I reboot, but since this is the Thin Puppy Torture Test II, I ignored that warning.

The system is still running fine, and I got the chance to use MtPaint and GTKSee as image viewers. MtPaint isn't really designed to look at images in a "slide show" fashion, but one good thing is that you can open an image in a directory, use ctrl-mouse wheel to shrink it so it fits in the window, and then retain that image size when viewing all the other images in the directory, opening them up as needed.

But GTKSee is better for doing a slide show. Just open the application (under Graphics), navigate to the proper directory, and start the slide show under the Tools menu (or by typing ctrl-S).

P.S. Since I didn't have enough memory in the Thin Puppy to burn a CD with all those images, I started up Puppy 2.17 (it was the first Puppy CD I found) on my Windows box, mounted the SD chip and threw everything into a directory on the Windows drive. I got the usual warnings about writing to NTFS partitions, but I ignored them. I got a warning the next time I booted into Windows, but everything was there, and everything was fine. (I burned my CD in Windows, not Puppy because I had work to do with the proprietary publishing software that I need for my "real" job).

I'll have to experiment with Puppy's CD burning applications later.

But one thing I always forget is that Puppy runs GREAT on my 3 GHz Pentium 4 Dell. I'm not used to running Linux of any kind on such a "powerful" machine. I'd love to run all my Linux distros on something so "good" (its 512 MB RAM is twice what I have on any other box).

One thing about low-spec Linux distros like Puppy. As well as they run on old, old hardware, if you can get everything configured, they really fly on "modern" PCs.

Pup_save thoughts: The pup_save in Puppy Linux has a predetermined size. Usually the largest you can make is 1.25 GB. There is a warning message that crops up (I can't remember where) that says you can make a pup_save up to 1.83 GB, but that is the largest tested configuration. I don't know if there is a limit on the size of a "save" file in Damn Small Linux or Knoppix (both of which use the same "save" technology, I think -- but don't quote me), and having a limit on how big the pup_save can be is somewhat of a limitation in Puppy. I suggest having additional storage space outside of the pup_save on which to store large files -- and large amounts of files, for that matter.

On this Thin Puppy, unless I add another Flash drive, I'm stuck with the 256 MB on the primary USB Flash drive.

Nothing much to report today, except that the monitor does go into power-saving mode when idle. It just takes awhile.

Everything is running great. I almost forgot how much I like using Seamonkey as a Web browser. I haven't yet set up the mail-client portion yet, but I do plan to.

I still think Geany is one of the best text editors out there. And despite it's lack of typographical, "smart" quotes, AbiWord is a model of how light yet powerful a word-processing application can and should be. And MtPaint continues to get the job done when it comes to preparing images for the Web (although I'd just about kill for a Linux-compatible photo editor that didn't obliterate and even allowed editing of the Photoshop-implanted IPTC info embedded in JPEG images).

Today's "free memory" in the Puppy Memory Applet: 113 MB.

I found out through Distrowatch that the next release of Damn Small Linux, version 4.2, will replace Xpaint with the unusually light, highly usable MtPaint -- pretty much my favorite Linux image editor. (If it dealt with IPTC info in JPGs, it would be my favorite photo-editing program on all platforms.)

It makes DSL that much more usable for the kind of work I do; with MtPaint, I can easily crop and resize images for Web publication. And MtPaint is one of the fastest programs of this type out there. In Puppy Linux, where I first discovered MtPaint, it loads in mere seconds and does just about everything I need.

And with the the GTK2(??) MyDSL package, you can add AbiWord, then even the GIMP if MtPaint isn't enough for you. It all depends on how much you want to tart up your DSL installation. While I gravitate toward Puppy, I also use DSL quite a bit, depending on which distro works better for the given hardware and working situation.

Hint: MtPaint is NOT available in the Ubuntu or Debian repositories, but IS easily downloaded and installed in .deb package format. There's also a Slackware package at the same site.

Another hint: Distros that offer MtPaint include Vector and Wolvix.